He was a lovely person, very, very smiley.
He was very warm.
He was very, very loving.
He was very caring and thoughtful.
John was 16 and he was in his GCSE year
and he was complaining of headaches.
And we went to the doctor's on a number of occasions and they dismissed it as exam pressure.
We had an optician's appointment and the optician picked up that all was not well
and sent us straight to the GP.
And by six o'clock that evening he was having his first CAT scan,
and the following morning his first lot of surgery.
And then, of course, it was discovered that it was in fact Midale Blastomere
which is a childhood cancerous brain tumour, which was very shocking.
And we really did have to stop and change our lives completely.
It was a terrible scary time, very scary.
John's mobility had gone really downhill,
but regularly we would have our own little worship services in his hut,
and I would read the bible and we'd play a hymn on a CD.
That's where Psalm 23 came in.
It was a very appropriate Psalm at the time, and he really related to it.
In 2012, he went very downhill and the chemo that he was having stopped working
and he was referred to St Peter's Hospice in Bristol.
Bear in mind that he was in a place where he was having a lot of medical interventions.
He's had all kinds of things that made him sick.
I think the whole picture of Psalm 23,
I think conjured up this beautiful meadow
where he could perhaps lie down and have the sun on his cheeks
and he could hear the water trickling somewhere
and this beautiful visual image of somewhere that was very peaceful.
The obvious bit is really,
'even though I walk in the valley of death,'
you know, this shadowy dark place,
John was doing that.
He actually was walking in the valley of the shadow of death.
He was dying, you know.
And so to be able to have a Bible reading that actually
said this is for you,
this is for you
and at the end of it all,
you are going to live in the house of God forever.
And it was then I realised how important it was to him.
There was a very significant moment.
It was actually the last day that John was really conscious.
He loved going into the hospice gardens and we'd gone outside,
and Reverend Ian - who's one of the vicars from this parish - had come to visit John.
And then John said, 'Can we go into the sanctuary?'.
And so we went inside to this beautiful room with a stained glass window, which was beautiful.
It had like a weeping willow alongside a stream and green meadows.
And John asked him to read Psalm 23.
And so he read Psalm 23 and John said -
he was in a wheelchair at that point and he just leaned back in his wheelchair and he said, 'That was wonderful'.
That was probably the last conscious thing he did.
That was very special indeed.
It'll be forever wrapped up in John.
It'll be forever the Psalm that I think of,
you know, when I think of John
and I think it's the hope that it brings to me.
I'm not walking in the valley of the shadow of death at the moment,
but I have been having some quite dark times
and I think when you're going through things that are difficult, when life challenges you,
it's always good to remember that God walks with you
and that he's going to provide all you need.
So yes, it's important to me and always will be.